The rainbow's end

Chiwetel Ejiofor came to notice as the lead in Dirty Pretty Things, with a silent scream of a performance. He tells Simon Hattenstone where the pain and the dignity came from - and why what he's really trying to find in all his roles is . . . himself.

Chiwetel Ejiofor: 'There's no point in living without being a romantic, is there?' Photo: Myung Jung Kim / PA

Chiwetel Ejiofor is not a man for certainties. But he is convinced of one thing: what makes him a good actor is that we know nothing about him. And he is determined to keep it that way. But there's a problem - when it comes down to it, he can't help himself, he likes to chat and, truth be known, he doesn't care much for secrets.

He made his name in 2002 as Okwe in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, playing a Nigerian illegal immigrant, a doctor who scrapes a living on two black market jobs, as a cabbie and a hotel clerk. Ejiofor's Okwe, a man of great dignity and quiet desperation, holds the film together as his world falls apart. This great silent scream of a performance created such an impression that Woody Allen and Spike Lee hired him for movies that will appear later this year.

Many will remember him as the posh totty in Richard Curtis's Love, Actually. In the Knight's Tale, one of the reimagined Canterbury Tales screened by the BBC last year, he was a prisoner madly in love or lust, or both; and in Trust, the designer-lawyer TV series also made for the BBC last year, he played another bit of posh totty. Apart from Dirty Pretty Things, he's probably done his best work on stage: he's played Othello, Macbeth and, to greatest acclaim, an incendiary schizophrenic bouncing off the walls in Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange at the National Theatre in 2000.

Ejiofor, better known as Chiwe, which is actually pronounced Chewy, shuffles into the cafe in Brixton, drowning in a second-world-war coat. He sits down, orders a coffee and smiles. It's an ambiguous smile - friendly and suspicious. It's a smile that says, "What the hell am I doing?" He doesn't like interviews, and here he is having agreed to do one. I ask him why he became an actor. "Oh no!" he says. Is that a bad question? "No, it's just so early in the morning."

It's 11.30am. So instead he tells me about the coat - how it belongs to his flatmate, and how before that it belonged to his flatmate's grandfather, who was in the French Resistance, and how it's probably turn of the 20th century and has seen some serious war action. He stops. "I wanted to act . . . " he says. "I'm trying to answer your question - I wanted to act because I wanted to express myself." He stops again, and laughs self-consciously. Again, we lapse into silence.

So what was Spike Lee like to work with, I say, to fuel the conversation. He talks about how Lee recently came over and they went to watch Arsenal together, and he loved it. And what is the film, She Hate Me, about? Well, he says when pressed, he plays Frank Wills, the security guard who raised the alarm when he discovered door locks taped over in the Watergate building. This led to the arrest of the burglars and the unravelling of a conspiracy that led to the impeachment of US president Richard Nixon. For 10 minutes he became a national hero, until he'd served his purpose and, like so many whistleblowers, was left to rot.

What is Lee like as a director? "Erm, what does he do? I don't know. Erm, that's actually quite an interesting question. What does he do? I don't know." Well, what about Woody Allen, can you tell me about your part in his movie, Melinda And Melinda? Not really, he says; he's yet to see the finished product. But it must have been fascinating to work with such a legend, I gabble desperately. "I thought he was lovely . . .just . . .just a funny bloke, really. Just a nice, weird, eccentric . . ." And he trails off.

Ejiofor was born in 1976 to a successful Nigerian couple in Forest Gate, east London. He started acting at public school, Dulwich College, when he was 13. He went on to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and, at 19, was given a small part as a translator in Steven Spielberg's Amistad. Three years later, in 2000, he was voted Outstanding Newcomer in the London Evening Standard Awards, and the following year was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Olivier Awards for Blue/Orange.

Of the movies he's just finished working on, the one that means most to him is the adaptation of Gillian Slovo's novel Red Dust. He has recently returned from filming this story, about love, vengeance and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, and says that the country had a profound effect on him. When he went there, he expected it to be life-changing, but not in the way it was. "You think there are these amazing people running the country who went to extraordinary lengths to do that, and you think it's going to be reflected in every aspect of South Africa; that it may be the most perfect place in the world, a harmonious society coming together. And I had this feeling when I was landing that it was going to be the most extraordinary experience and it was, but not for those reasons. For rather depressing reasons. It was just so devastating."

What hit him most when he got there? "Segregation. That's what hits you. Segregation." The South Africa that Ejiofor saw was largely one of wealthy, empowered white people and poor, disempowered black people; it seemed little different from apartheid South Africa. He says he found it so much harder to be a black man in South Africa than a black man in Britain, "because you're African and you just don't think these sort of things should be happening to Africans in Africa. If it exists in European countries, then that's the problem and decision and resolution of the indigenous population, but you feel in Africa it's a bit illegitimate for people to be treated like that."

Ejiofor looks as if he's getting depressed even thinking about it. I seem to be bringing out the worst of him. It's not that we're getting on badly. It's just the more we talk, the more gloomy he becomes. So I change the subject. What does he regard as his best work? "Well, you fuck up everything in the end, when you look back at it. I've never done a theatre show that I haven't left on the last day, when the curtain's gone down, without thinking, well, I really made a hash of that. You always feel there are so many other choices you could have made and so many other things you could have done."

What about Othello? "Oh God, that was the worst one, yeah." Why? "Because I didn't get anywhere near it. I didn't know anything about it." He played Othello twice, at the National Youth Theatre, and says he screwed it up twice. "But what can you do, you're 18?" He had seen two Othellos - one with Willard White, the other Orson Welles - and bursts out laughing at the idea that he could have compared with either of them. What about his Romeo? "I bolloxed that one up, too. I can see what the headline is going to be here."

That's not the way those who have worked with him see it, however. Tom Hooper, who directed him in Red Dust, calls him an "extraordinary" actor. "I had to keep reminding myself that he was in his mid-20s. [Ejiofor is 27 today]. There is a tremendous maturity to his work. He's intellectually bright - he'll surprise you when he's acting, but when he talks about it, you realise there is an analytical logic to his performance. It felt more like a collaboration than me directing him. We ended up writing a lot of the scenes together."

Frears says he was worried when he cast Ejiofor in Dirty Pretty Things; so much rested on his performance. "But he coped with it brilliantly. He held the whole thing together. I don't understand what it is he does - he just does it. You know, I think he based Okwe on his father. His mother was rather alarmed when she saw it. He's great fun, Chiwe. Smart, interesting, a bit of a lad. Drinks too much, mind."

Ejiofor smiles when I deliver Frears's verdict. "Well, maybe I drink a bit too much by his standards." And is he laddish? "Well, I like to think so." Pause. "I'm not a Loaded boy." Another pause. "I don't know. I enjoy a couple of drinks on a Friday night, a bit of a singsong. I'm a weekend beergutter."

It's not quite Friday evening - we're still a few hours off - but we decide to go for a drink, anyway. Only one problem: every bar we try is shut. Eventually we find one that is sufficiently manky and unclosed. We settle down to a game of pool with a couple of pints of lager. He seems much more relaxed.

"So are you in love?" he asks out of the blue. Blimey, I say, that's a bit of a question - it's the first thing you've asked me. "Well, I think it's the most important question to ask somebody." Why? "Because it just sort of defines them, and it's always very sad if they are not." I ask him if he's in love. He grins, says he thinks he is, and he's moving in with her; and, no, he's not going to give me a name.

Last year, Ejiofor said in an interview that he was looking for the kind of volcanic love that would devour him. He nods. "Well, there's no point in living without being a romantic, is there?" What does it mean to be a romantic? "It means that you can find love and joy in everybody, everything, everyone."

He talks about how his parents met when they were 16 or so, possibly younger, and how they were deeply, perfectly in love. His father, a medical doctor who doubled up as a pop star, was adored in Nigeria. He wrote songs, which he performed with his mother and his wife, Ejiofor's mother. (He shuts his eyes and sings their most famous song in a lovely, mellow voice). Life, he says, was always precarious for his parents in Nigeria - they belonged to the Christian Ibo tribe, who were massacred during the civil war in the late 1960s because they were accused of trying to take over the government by the ruling Muslim Hausa tribe.

When Ejiofor's dad was hit on the head by a soldier's rifle, he fell to the floor unconscious, and the thing that most surprised his brother, who was with him, was that he wasn't dead. Ejiofor's parents left for England in their mid-20s, when the Biafran war was raging. Once settled in London, he requalified as a doctor and then took a PhD in biochemistry and physiology. Ejiofor's mother became a pharmacist. As we retreat from the pool table, I notice a scar on his forehead and ask how he got it. "When I was 11, I went out of a car door," he says matter-of-factly. That sounds awful, I say. "Yes, it was. I was in hospital for 10 weeks, which is a bit rough when you are a kid." He stops, and I sense he's going to leave it at that. He takes a sip of his pint. I tell him I also spent ages in hospital as a kid, and if he tells me his, I'll tell him mine.

"I dunno. I mean, I was in a car accident. I went out of the car door and I was in hospital for a while," he repeats. So where did he get the scar on his forehead? "I broke my arm, and they were a bit worried about me because my head was a bit fucked. It was a cab driver. His fault." His sentences become stubby and broken. The family were visiting his grandparents in Nigeria. "My dad was in the car. With three other people who I didn't know. Yes, my father was killed. And so was the guy in the passenger seat and the guy who was driving. There was a man who survived who was sitting next to me." Ejiofor tells this story as calmly, as indifferently, as he can - as if it's just one of those things that happen. I'm sure he wouldn't have denied it happened, but I doubt he would have volunteered the information. There are BBC press releases that refer to his father as if he is still alive.

All I can think of saying is bloody hell, that's awful. "All this was a long time ago," he says. How old was his dad? "Thirty-nine. It's not something that I enjoy talking about but . . . it's a devastating thing to happen . . . if people ask about it, I tell them, but . . . " He changes the subject, and says how refreshing it was to go from South Africa to Nigeria. "The mythology of the Afrikaner is based on some sort of inferiority, the whole thing, and Nigeria was the greatest antidote in the world. I feel very lucky to be part of two cultures." He is talking half-heartedly, as if distracting himself, and me, from the thing we are thinking about.

"You were 11 when the accident happened?" I say. "Yes. Definitely. Nasty business. Nasty business this life." What can he remember of the accident? "I can remember the car coming round the corner and knowing something bad was about to happen. I guess that's all I remember, and then intermittently waking up. And I remember waking up and my father's half-brother, John Bull was his name, was carrying me across a field to another unit at the hospital. Years later, I thanked him for it."

Did it fuck Ejiofor up? "It fucked me up quite a lot in the end, yes." The accident, or his father's death? "I think the whole thing." Between every sentence he sups on his pint, wishing away the conversation.

Did he remember his dad well? "Yeah. I mean, very well. I might have to have another beer since we're having this conversation. I can see where this is going now. Hehehehehe! I think we're going to have to stop talking about this."

I tell him that what I loved about him in Dirty Pretty Things is that he seemed to have so much going on in his head when he was saying so little. That he was brilliant when he was saying nothing. He grins. "Thanks. I'll try and shut up more." I feel bad now. "No," he says, "it's very kind of you. I just try to tell the truth and find out about myself, in a way." The day he stops finding things out, he says, is the day he will stop acting. So what did he find out in Dirty Pretty Things? "Well, it taught me I can be terrified. And it organised what I'm scared of." Which is? "Being found out. And, of course, that's Okwe's journey in the film. But he's in a more literal sense scared of being found out. I think I'm scared in every way of being uncovered. The obvious answer is being found out about your work, but that's not the point. It's being found out about you. It's the fear of being discovered to be scared. It's the fear of fear, and people knowing it."

When he read the script, he pictured Okwe as his father, and decided it made sense to base the character on him. "I wanted to look a little like my dad. I just related to him through the script very, very strongly. My father was very pragmatic; that was his nature and that was Okwe's nature. And my father was a doctor like Okwe, and they'd gone through similar situations."

So no wonder his mother was so startled when she saw Dirty Pretty Things. "Yes, I suppose that's right, and also the film is about dreaming and waking up from dreams, and I guess that is what is so interesting about the experience of people who travel from places that are in trouble and believe there is another side to it all, another angle of humanity across the river, across the border, that something is going to change so fundamentally, and there is a rainbow's end, you know?"

Did they find their rainbow? "No, of course not." What did they find? "Other people. Other fucked up people. And that's the waking up - that there is no corner of the world that is great." In the end, he says, his parents declared a kind of independence from the world.

Your father sounds amazing, I say, what with being a double doctor and the music career, and all before he was 39. "Yeah, he was. There's a very famous actor in Nigeria, and I went to see him because he knew my dad and I wanted to have a chat with him, and he said to his son, pointing to me, 'This is also my son', which I loved."

What did he mean? "He meant he grew up with my father in the north, and I think he just meant that he loved me and was sorry about what happened and wanted me to know he was there. It's just about love, isn't it?"

After he recovered from the accident, Ejiofor returned to school in England. A friend of a friend was at Dulwich College with him and recalls that he stood up to the bullies on behalf of the bullied. At school, he says, the children were split into two camps: the kids who watched movies with their parents from the age of 10, and those who hardly ever saw their parents because they were working all hours to keep their kids in private education. "I was in the second camp."

You know you said your dad's death screwed you up, I say . . . "Ermmmm," he says, and it seems to go on for ever. "I don't know. I guess you just see the other side, don't you?" The more we drink, the more elliptical he gets. "It was a betrayal in the end." Of what? "Of what you deem to be the rules." I still don't know what he means. Who betrayed whom? "I suppose life has betrayed an individual by putting them in a situation where things happen to them that are random and desperately sad."

Did his dad's death make him angry? "Well, I don't know if you can help it. It's like that Nigel Williams play, Class Enemy. I think it says, 'Fuck dogs, fuck cats' - it's just a real tirade against the world. And I think if your father dies in a car accident and you're 11, you get a bit pissed off about stuff because it's unfair. I'm going to have another one before we go."

I go to the bar. When I return, he is listening to the tape of the interview, looking so miserable. "Jesus Christ. I sound like such an arsehole," he says. He then proceeds to tear apart the whole interview process quite brilliantly - why are you interviewing me, he says, when you could be talking to interesting people, people who have done something; why is his opinion or back story more interesting than the person sitting next to us just because he's been in films; why do interviews have to reduce a person to a single defining fact or event when life is so messy and complex? He's still listening to the tape. "It's horrible, it's rubbish." He says it's a distortion, an invented reality. "We're going to sit down and talk about stuff. I mean, fuck! And then you're going to put it in the paper. And then people are going to fucking read it. In some ways, I just don't get it."

Then he stops and says, no, the worst thing is that in some ways it's not a distortion, that this really is him and he's actually trying to outwit the process. "In some ways, I just don't get it," he repeats. "Then I wonder what I want to do. Do I want to sound cool and interesting and funky? I mean, I don't know." While he tries to hold back, there is something compulsively honest about him - yes, he says, the interview is another role and he's damned if he knows how to play it.

Oh God, I say, I think I've brought you down; you seemed quite happy when you walked in. "I am a little depressed, actually. Only because I was listening to what I was saying." We stare into our glasses, both of us mired in self-disgust. I can't believe that I'm putting him through this, him being such a lovely bloke, too. He can't believe he's allowing himself to be put through it. Perhaps the honourable thing would be not to write up the interview, and just tell the editor we had a drink and it didn't work out. "Yes," he says. But we both know it's gone beyond that. We stare some more into our beer. Perhaps we should end it all, I say, trying to lighten things up. "No, nobody's killing themselves," he says. "There's that great line in Death Of A Salesman, 'Nobody's killing themselves'."

Look, I say eventually, I think you're great at what you do. To no avail. "So I should be in the paper? I don't think I should be anywhere near the paper. It just undermines certain things that I value . . . that I present myself independently. Talk to her," he says, turning round to the woman at the table nearest to us.

He talks about all the great people he met in South Africa - people who fought literally and otherwise for freedom. He tells me about George Bizos, the lawyer for Nelson Mandela, who told him about an ANC guy sent to jail for 18 years, wrongfully accused of being part of the armed resistance. "The guy would have loved to have been a member of the MK [the armed wing of the ANC], but he wasn't, and anyway, George was defending this guy and it was very clear that he wasn't part of this wonderful thing, and he was being sentenced in handcuffs and taken away, and his wife stood at the back of the court and said to the judge, 'Eighteen years is nothing because I will wait for him.' And then he was led out. And George Bizos was telling me this story, and he wept, and he said when you see that kind of thing you'll never give up, you'll never stop fighting for people, you'll never stop because of the resolve people have."

I tell him that I once interviewed Desmond Tutu. "You interviewed Desmond Tutu?" Ejiofor says, and he's almost weeping. "Right, let's stop this." He tries to turn off the tape recorder. He asks how we can justify an interest in his life. I rack my brains. It's a tricky one - he's not a risk to security, we don't have a right to know. All I can think of to say is, pathetically, that we want to know because we like you and we're nosy.

"What's the point of interviewing me if you've interviewed Desmond Tutu? You can't help comparing talking to me with talking to somebody who's actually done something interesting." Why does he think what he does is boring? "Well, it's not world-changing is it? You interview actors, but what do we do really? Nothing. I'm a bit pissed," he apologises. "I mean, in the end, so what, I did a couple of plays, I had some tragedy in my life, I had some happiness, I mean, you know, who cares in the end? It's just an invention. I'd much rather people went to see some play I was in or some films I really believe in than open a paper and say, 'Oh there's this bloke and his dad died and his mum's a nice lass and . . .' You know, who gives a fuck? Really? Apart from me. I give a fuck."